This story was so close to the memory that Paul had produced only a few days before. The detail about Sandy being tied to the bed was a match, almost like the axe story. And yet, if Sandy was a victim of such a brutal rape, why couldn’t she remember it? Why couldn’t Paul Ross remember his own abuse by Rabie and Risch the same night they raped his mother? What about the years of abuse his sisters endured—why didn’t he know about or remember that? He did mention one occasion when his father came into the bedroom he shared with Chad and took his younger brother out of the room in the middle of the night. The boy was crying. That was all that came to mind.
In fact, there wasn’t a single bit of Paul Ross’s statement that the detectives could use. It was so tantalizing, so frustrating. They couldn’t charge suspects for crimes the victims couldn’t recall. If only Paul Ross could remember more, or admit that he also had been abused! As it was, Paul Ross was more of a liability than an asset to the prosecution. At one point, Schoening became so upset he backed the young man against a wall. “We know you’re a victim!” he insisted. The young man demanded a break. He said he needed to be alone. He promised that he would be back in thirty minutes. He walked out and didn’t come back.
He did locate his mother, however, and telephoned her for the first time in two years. “Mom, I know everything that happened,” he told her, according to Sandy’s later statement. She said he related what he had said to the detectives, including the rape scene. Sandy asked Paul Ross if he had repressed these memories and then suddenly recovered them. No, her son told her, he had always remembered them, but lately he had been going to a hypnotist who was helping him remember even more.
Sandy recalled the remark that Ericka’s friend Paula Davis had made to her that night at Denny’s when Ericka had first disclosed the abuse to her. “You’re the only one in the family who didn’t know,” Davis had said. That must have been true, Sandy realized. Now the only person in her family, except herself, who maintained that he had never been abused was nine-year-old Mark.
On December 20, back in Olympia, Joe Vukich and Loreli Thompson met with Ericka and her advocate, Paula Davis, at the sheriff’s office. Davis, twenty-nine, was a schoolteacher who described herself as Ericka’s best friend. Under Washington state law, victims of violent or sexual crimes are entitled to have a spokesperson present at any interview. Given the victim’s state of mind, the investigators thought it appropriate to
conduct the session in a special room that had been set up—ironically, by Jim Rabie—for interviews with abused children. Ericka and Paula sat in miniature chairs, amid the plastic toys and security blankets.
Vukich asked Ericka if her brothers or her sister had ever discussed their abuse with her. “No.” Ericka was monosyllabic. Sometimes it seemed that she didn’t even hear the questions. Vukich managed to get her to say that the last time Rabie had molested her was three months earlier, in September.
“Was your sister in the room with you?” asked Vukich.
“No.”
After a while, she whispered that she needed to stop for a moment. The detectives left her in the room with Paula. When Vukich glanced in through a small window in the door, he saw the two women sitting on the floor. Ericka was cuddled up in Paula’s lap, sobbing. His heart went out to her. He’d never seen a grown woman reduced to such a state.
“Do you remember what we asked you, Ericka, about what Mr. Rabie did when he came over to the bed?” Vukich said when the interview resumed.
Ericka sat mute, shifting in her chair and tugging at a thread on her jeans. A minute passed.
“And this was the last week of September,” Thompson said to break the silence.
“What was it that he did, Ericka?” Vukich asked again. “Did he make you do something to him?”
“Yes.” She hid her face in Paula’s shoulder.
“Did he make you touch him somewhere? You’re shaking your head. Is that yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“What part of his body did you have to touch, Ericka?” Thompson asked.
“Can we stop for a minute? I have to go to the bathroom,” Ericka suddenly announced, and she left the room.
The detectives could hear her retching in the toilet. Davis went after her. The two women were gone for some time. When they came back, Ericka handed the detectives a sheet of paper on which she had written a detailed statement. Vukich read it aloud for the record:
I was asleep in my room in bed and heard Jim Rabie come in and that’s when I looked up and saw him. He started touching me with his hands first on the outside of my sweats, then underneath. He touched my chest and on my private parts, front and back. He inserted his fingers in my front and back private parts. He kept telling me to be quiet in a threatening voice. My mom and dad were awake someplace in the house. He forced my head to his front private part with his hands. He was very rough and hurt me with his hands. It seemed that this continued for a long time. I was scared and didn’t know what to do. He had previously threatened me that he would kill me and do worse things to me if I refused or if I told. He thrust his front private part into my mouth repeatedly for a long time. Then he ejaculated in my mouth. His pants were down, but not off. Then he started making grunting noises. Then he started touching me orally with his mouth on my chest and front and back private parts. This seemed to continue for a long time and he was very rough and hurt me. Then he stopped and said I knew what would happen if I told. Then he urinated all over my body in bed. He didn’t defecate on me this time. Later, my father came in.
Vukich could barely control his emotions as he read this; he felt overwhelmed by the monstrousness of the scene Ericka had just described. “I think I’d like to start at the end, where you say ‘He didn’t defecate on me this time,’ ” Vukich said gently. “Were there other times when this same scenario happened where he did defecate on you?”
“Yes.”
When Ericka left the interview room, Vukich took her handwritten statement down the hall and threw it on his lieutenant’s desk. “The son of a bitch shit on her!” he cried. His voice was quaking. He had never felt this way about a victim before. His feelings were more those of a protective older brother, he believed, or the loving father she had apparently never had—even though he was not that much older than Ericka. When the other detectives observed how emotional Vukich became in speaking about her, they joked nervously that he was falling in love.
The same day that Ericka was making this statement, Sandy drove back to Olympia. She had decided to leave Mark in the care of her relatives in Spokane in order to keep him out of the grasp of the Child Protective Services. She knew, however, that she wouldn’t be able to hide him forever.
Sandy went straight to Pastor Bratun’s office. This time, Bratun was more understanding. He explained to her that when he had said she was eighty percent evil he was also saying there was a side to her that was twenty percent good. This was the side that had brought her back. This was the side that was trying to remember. To encourage her he revealed some of the new memories that Ingram was producing. Many of them concerned satanic scenes. One involved a former girlfriend of Ray Risch’s, who Paul said was the high priestess of the cult. Paul had remembered having sex with her after a ritual in a barn. He had signed an oath in blood, pledging loyalty to the cult. If he tried to break away, his younger daughter would be killed. Sandy said she couldn’t remember any such scenes. Paul had also recalled Sandy having sex with Risch, Bratun told her. He asked if that had ever happened. Sandy said no, then hesitated. “Oh, no!” she cried, and fell forward, burying her head between her knees.
The first memory Sandy produced resembled the scene her
eldest child had described. She was not tied to the bed, however, and it was Risch having sex with her, not Rabie. Paul stood to one side, guarding the door. Then another memory surfaced. This time she was tied up, but she was on the living room floor. Rabie was there, naked, and for some reason he was on all fours, howling like a dog. Sandy then saw herself in a closet with Paul. He had hold of her hair and was hitting her with a stick of kindling. The others were in the living room, laughing at her, calling her fat. Paul pulled her out of the closet and hurled her on the bed, where Rabie and Risch had anal intercourse with her. It seemed to Sandy that these events must have happened sometime before 1978.
After leaving Bratun’s office, Sandy returned to Spokane to spend Christmas with Mark.
Paul Ingram had just been transferred to a jail in another county. His bail was set at $200,000. Once he was away from the daily interrogations and the constant reinforcement of the detectives and the urgings of his pastor, he began to have renewed doubts about the accuracy of some of his memories. A Christian counselor hired by Ingram’s attorney administered a series of diagnostic tests. On the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), Ingram showed himself to be adaptable, resourceful, and self-reliant, if also restless, nonconforming, and easily bored. “Individuals who have this MMPI profile often perceive the world in different and original ways,” wrote the counselor in his report. “They may be perceived as somewhat eccentric, unpredictable, or imaginative. They tend to think differently, at times negatively, and frequently are perceived as aloof, touchy, emotionally distant or apart, and preoccupied.” The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) revealed a person with an exaggerated need to be liked. Ingram showed a “rigid and tense compliance to social convention.” He was the kind of person who was prone
to follow orders. People such as Ingram “tend to show a perfectionist element, and condemnation causes them considerable tension, especially if conveyed by persons in authority.… This overall cooperativeness may hide strong rebellious feelings that may occasionally break through the front of propriety and restraint. These individuals lack insight, are often indecisive, and are easily upset by deviations from their daily routine. A pattern of rigid self-control is typical, and individuals with this profile only occasionally relax the edgy tension and guarded defensiveness that conceal their anxious feelings.” The Rorschach test described a person who “has difficulty getting the whole picture.” In the opinion of the counselor, Ingram “distorts data to meet his own needs rather than showing an outright thought disorder.”
Ingram insisted on taking the Sexual Addiction Screening Test three times—once giving answers based on his state of mind before his arrest, once for the period before Pastor Bratun came and delivered him of demon spirits, and once for his current state. The first exam showed him to have no sexual deviations at all; however, on the basis of Ingram’s responses in the two other exams, the counselor diagnosed him as a pedophile and a “walking time bomb.”
The counselor also talked to Dr. Peterson and Pastor Bratun about Ingram. Peterson described Ingram as highly manipulative and completely separated (“dissociated”) from his feelings, so much so that Peterson believed that Ingram had two ego states—a split personality, in layman’s terms. He also recognized the effects of cult programming on Ingram. Bratun agreed with Peterson’s observations. He saw the two ego states consisting of, on the one hand, a hardworking, civic-minded, loving father, who was so priggish he “wouldn’t let his daughter come downstairs in a nightgown,” and, on the other hand, an angry, violent, and manipulative individual who was the
polar opposite in every respect of the Paul Ingram most people knew and respected. In Bratun’s opinion, the exorcism in the jail cell had been the key moment in integrating these two opposing halves.
“He speaks with very flat responses, and no affect,” the counselor reported. “It appears that he gives himself permission to ‘get a memory’ when this is done in a Christian context. Mr. Ingram appears to be a product of a dissociative disorder in which there is more than one personality that is capable of assuming control. He does not, however, appear to fit the criteria of multiple-personality disorder. Mr. Ingram does appear to have been affected by periods of intense indoctrination around cult issues.… In a sense, the longer his secret life remained separated, and the more pressure was brought by external forces to do more and more deviant sexual acting out, the more tightly he bound the walls of his separate, dissociative life.” The Christian counselor added that, as Ingram was prayed for, “he began to make the tightly bound compartments mentioned above (separate ego states) porous and allowed some of the memories to begin to return.” This defense counselor would eventually testify for the prosecution.
It was a stark Christmas for many families. The detectives found that the Ingram case was following them home, when they had the chance to be home at all. They certainly weren’t in a holiday mood. To cheer them up, Ericka brought in a plate of Christmas cookies. Undersheriff McClanahan was so worried about the mental health of his investigative team that he assembled a team of psychologists to debrief them. The detectives were encouraged to express their feelings candidly, but they reacted so furiously that the psychologists beat a retreat and diagnosed the whole bunch as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rabie and Risch were both in solitary confinement. Rabie was still pleading for a lie detector test. He refused to take his medication for narcolepsy and spent much of his time sleeping; it was the only time he had ever felt grateful for his affliction. During his waking moments, the former detective pored obsessively over the police reports of his case, which his attorney had secured. Risch lost forty pounds in solitary, and his hair, which had been jet black, turned completely white. His wife worried that he might have suffered a stroke; one day, he suddenly seemed unable to complete a sentence. His thoughts wandered, and he had difficulty hearing.
On the day after Christmas, Sandy returned, again alone, to the house on Fir Tree Road. “Dear Paul,” she wrote that day, “I am praying for you that you can be totally and wholly restored.… Sometimes I am very afraid. Afraid because of what has happened in the past.… Sometimes I am even afraid of you Paul mostly because I do not know the truth. Was I controlled by you.” Apparently contradicting what she told Pastor Bratun, she continued, “I am not remembering anything, but with God’s help I will remember. I was very tired after driving today. I was also very upset—and didn’t want to come back here. I didn’t want to leave Mark.” Then she began to draw upon other memories, memories that she and Paul shared. “Do you remember Paul Ross he was such a good baby so smart—do remember Ericka so beautiful, so tiny a diaper just wouldn’t fit. And Andrea—How they would cry every night and I would sit & cry & hold them and as soon as you come home & took one of them they would quit crying—& Chad how badly you wanted another boy—He was a delight a quite delight always telling funny things He was hard to correct because everything he said would make you laugh—” Here the handwriting became skewed, and it spilled over the ruled lines of the stationery. “Paul, Do you remember how we
meet—How shy you where? Do you rember that first drive in movie I remember but not the movie Do you rembere even before we married how we said or you said if we were unfaithful that was it Do you Remember—all the Ice Cream—when I was pregnant with Paul Ross—”